Late last month, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats called North Korea’s nuclear weapons program a “potential existential threat to the United States.” Coats hedges a bit by throwing in the modifier “potentially,” but he has spoken this way before. Unless he has spectacular secret information, this is woefully inaccurate. North Korea is a growing threat to the United States with its nuclear missile program, and it is indeed an existential threat to South Korea and Japan. But the threat Pyongyang poses to the United States is not actually existential as, for example, Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals

What is it with these people with all this ´stupid talk´ and prattle in the public forum? Back and forth, back and forth .. like a couple kids in grade school or something. I don´t think I´ve ever heard so much unfettered, unnecessary beezwax before.

Late last month, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats called North Korea’s nuclear weapons program a “potential existential threat to the United States.” Coats hedges a bit by throwing in the modifier “potentially,” but he has spoken this way before. Unless he has spectacular secret information, this is woefully inaccurate. North Korea is a growing threat to the United States with its nuclear missile program, and it is indeed an existential threat to South Korea and Japan. But the threat Pyongyang poses to the United States is not actually existential as, for example, Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals

"Pundits should have fixed terms,” left-wing author Naomi Klein recently told the BBC. Awarded “jobs for life,” most professional commentators — whether opining in newspaper columns like this one or blathering on television — suffer no consequence for making predictions that turn out “spectacularly wrong.” Klein’s (partly tongue-in-cheek) solution? Hold our pundits to account by making them reapply for their sinecures every four years, banishing those whose prognostications prove most wide of the mark. The socialist Klein’s embrace of market forces, however selective, is welcome. Might I offer the unfolding horror in Venezuela as the first litmus test

These are dangerous days for Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s brain. A new book about the White House chief strategist portrays the president as the empty vessel into which Mr. Bannon poured his ideology and agenda, propelling the two of them into the White House. The book, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” by Joshua Green, a reporter who has known Mr. Bannon for years, is a best seller that gives Mr. Trump second billing. That’s made the empty vessel very angry.

When players get political, it turns out that fans can get political right back. After months of speculation and piles of anecdotal evidence, market-research company J. D. Power has weighed in with real data. After surveying 9,200 fans, researchers found that “national anthem protests were the top reason that NFL fans watched fewer games last season.” The protests were never popular. A September 2016 Reuters poll indicated that a super-majority of 72 percent of Americans believed the protests, led by Colin Kaepernick, were “unpatriotic,” but evidence that his protest had an impact on ratings was spotty, at best.

It’s heartening to see that President Trump’s weeklong, passive-aggressive assault on his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has crossed a line even for many of the president’s most stalwart supporters. Rush Limbaugh called Mr. Trump’s behavior “unseemly” on his radio show Monday. Of Mr. Sessions he said, “I hate to see him being treated this way.” Over in the Trump-friendly confines of Fox News, Tucker Carlson said the president’s humiliation of the attorney general was “a useless, self-destructive act,” and Mr. Carlson implored Mr. Trump: “For God’s sake, lay off Jeff Sessions. He’s your friend, one of the very few you

Let’s review a few recent developments. Last week, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned. This was part of a “White House shakeup” to get the Trump administration back on track. The new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, would fix the White House’s “messaging problem.” Within 24 hours of Scaramucci’s appointment, the president returned to Twitter and unloaded another torrent of political bombshells, including talking about his power to pardon, even as his attorneys were denying that Donald Trump was thinking about pardoning anyone.

It costs as little as $10 and as much as $10,169 to get the same blood test in California. A lower-back M.R.I. priced at $199 at one Florida clinic goes for $6,221 in San Francisco. A shoulder X-ray can run anywhere between $21 and more than $700 across the United States. In Spain, a 30-day supply of Truvada, which helps prevent H.I.V.-AIDS, costs an average of $559, according to data compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans. In the United States it’s $1,301. In Britain, the average price of an angioplasty is $7,264 versus $31,620 in the United States.

Carrollton, Ga. — Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young, white party activists and an older electorate that is more religious and more socially conservative.

Even if the country were to descend into widespread unrest, it wouldn’t look like the unrest of 50 years ago. One month into 1968, the Vietnamese celebrated their new year and the Viet Cong launched its Tet Offensive. The chief of the South Vietnamese national police was photographed executing a captured Viet Cong officer, horrifying viewers across the world. Communist forces rapidly overran most of Hue, and hundreds of U.S. Marines were killed taking it back over the following month.

The Australian authorities are treating an abduction and a killing near Melbourne on Monday, which ended with the gunman dead, as a terrorist attack. The police killed the gunman after he held a woman hostage at an apartment complex in Brighton, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs. The woman was rescued, and another man was found dead in the lobby, the police said. The authorities did not immediately identify the victims. The police identified the gunman as Yacqub Khayre, an Australian citizen with a long criminal record who came to the country from Somalia as a child refugee.

This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for

No liberal has standing to call any Republican stupid as long as Patty Murray remains in the U.S. Senate. Soon after being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, Murray went on a radio show and said: "When I was growing up, the big fear in my life was the nuclear war. I remember second- and third-grade teachers giving us skills to deal with it, if that big alarm goes off, which was ´Hide under your desk.´Would that do any good? I don't know. But as a child, that gives you a feeling there's something to do beyond panic. Today the biggest fear our kids live with is whether ... the kid beside them has a gun. We have to give them skills so

Failed presidential candidate and former first lady Hillary Clinton now has some interest in becoming a Methodist preacher, according to The Atlantic. Clinton’s pastor Bill Shillady told The Atlantic that Clinton had expressed interest in preaching when he saw her at a photo shoot for his book Strong for a Moment Like This for which Clinton has written the foreward. The book features daily devotionals he sent her during the 2016 campaign. “Clinton is lifting up an intimate, closely guarded part of herself,” Emma Green writes. “There are no more voters left to lose.

Since being released from prison in one of Obama´s final acts as president, she´s assumed a low-key life as an independent woman in New York City. But it seems Chelsea Manning is eager to share some parts of her new normal. Wearing just a scarlet swimsuit and delicate necklace, the 29-year-old is seen in a Vogue photoshoot this month that is reminiscent of Caitlyn Jenner´s famous Vanity Fair coming-out cover. With her blonde hair cut in to a pixie crop and sporting minimal make-up, she beamed for photographer Annie Lebowitz´s camera on a deserted East Coast beach. Raising her hands

Judge Andrew Napolitano said the FBI´s raid on the home of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is a significant development. The raid occurred July 26 in Virginia and was confirmed to Fox News today by a spokesman for Manafort. (Snip) Agents hauled away documents and other materials. Napolitano said on "Outnumbered" that to obtain the search warrant, agents would have had to persuade a judge that there was "probable cause of crime in the place to be searched." Napolitano said the raid indicates the FBI did not trust that Manafort would preserve the materials they intended to find. "That is very damning

Former President Barack Obama’s National Security adviser, Susan Rice, wants President Donald Trump to accept North Korea as a nuclear power. “History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed, criticizing the president’s “fire and fury” rhetoric in response to the escalating tensions between the two countries. Rice urged Gen. John Kelly, White House chief of staff, to stop Trump, and she pointedly attacked Dr. Sebastian Gorka,

Two of the senators who singlehandedly derailed the skinny repeal of Obamacare were awarded a sit down interview with the admiring Dana Bash Friday on CNN. The bright faced journalist applauded Sens. Susan Collins (ME) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) for having the “cajones” to vote against the Republican bill when they knew half the country would view them as heretics. Collins admitted it was an “uncomfortable” vote. But, they both insisted it was the right thing to do, which is why they did not fear backlash from GOP leadership, or even intimidating tweets from the Oval Office. Both women said they

Several teenagers who were involved in a deadly crash after stealing two cars had a whopping 126 arrests between the six of them. Keontae Brown, 16, Jimmie Goshey, 14, and Dejarae Thomas, 16, died after allegedly racing a stolen car through a red light going 100mph and smashed into another car. Keontae Brown´s younger brother Keondrae, 14, was also in the car but survived after the vehicle was launched into the air before bursting into flames in Palm Harbor, Florida on Sunday morning. They were allegedly playing a ´cat-and-mouse´ game with Kamal Campbell, 18, and Deyon Kaigler, 16, who were

There are two possible rationales: the legitimate one and the brass-knuckles one. Here’s the thing to bear in mind about the Washington Post’s report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had the FBI execute a search warrant against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in late July: Prosecutors don’t do pre-dawn raids on the home of a cooperating witness. Manafort has publicly projected cooperation. Of course, we can’t know how cooperative he has actually been. The public has been kept in the dark about what is being investigated, and Mueller and the congressional committees are doing most of their work behind

MARTHA’S VINEYARD, Mass.—Jamaicans and other foreign workers have long powered the summer economy in the upscale tourist haven of Martha’s Vineyard, cleaning hotel rooms, waiting tables and mixing fudge. This year, many local businesses had to come up with a Plan B. Facing a shortage of foreign laborers, local restaurants have reduced hours of operation and pared back menus. Managers are cleaning hotel rooms, laundry is piling up and at least one restaurant is using disposable cups to ease the dishwashers’ load. The problem is a scarcity of the H-2B visas used to bring foreign seasonal workers to the U.S.

Washington-FBI agents raided a home of President Donald Trump´s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort last month, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. The agents seized materials in Manafort´s home as part of the ongoing Russia investigation led by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the source said. "FBI agents executed a search warrant at one of Mr. Manafort´s residences. Mr. Manafort has consistently cooperated with law enforcement and other serious inquiries and did so on this occasion as well," Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Manafort, told CNN. He declined to provide further details. The so-called no-knock warrant, which was first reported

We are all going to have to just accept that Hilary Clinton is not going away. Especially now that her life story will be forever memorialized in an American Girl book. The book is called "A Girl Named Hillary: The True Story of Hillary Clinton," and is sure to be a lovely read. The book description explains: "The A Girl Named series tells the stories of how ordinary American girls grew up to be extraordinary American women. It took a lot of determination, courage, and confidence to become the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political

Worried by the Trump administration’s delay in announcing a military strategy for the war in Afghanistan, Sen. John McCain said Thursday he’ll try to force the debate on Capitol Hill, offering his own plan that would force a troop increase. The Arizona Republican, who is also chairman of the Armed Services Committee, didn’t lay out a number in the legislation but said more U.S. counterterrorism forces should be deployed, and given independent authority to strike targets of the Taliban, al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. Mr. McCain also said the U.S should secure a long-term agreement with Afghanistan for an

Hillary Clinton´s pastoral adviser urged her to keep her head up following her unexpected Election Day loss in November and compared the election to Good Friday, the day Jesus was crucified. "It is Friday, but Sunday is coming ... This is not the devotional you wish to receive this day. While Good Friday may be the starkest representation of a Friday that we have, life is filled with a lot of Fridays," wrote United Methodist City Society Executive Director the Rev. Bill Shillady in an email to Clinton obtained by CNN. "Friday is the day that it all falls apart and